


C’est Regarder Ensemble dans la Même Direction

by wraithnoir



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Gift Fic, M/M, This isn't my usual fandom, but i'm pretty good at angst, happy barricade day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-04-11 18:51:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19115617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wraithnoir/pseuds/wraithnoir
Summary: In the last moments of life that June 6 give Grantaire, his mind wanders to another life that could have been. Maybe.





	C’est Regarder Ensemble dans la Même Direction

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aemlai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aemlai/gifts).



In the moments before the end, those brief moments when fear is not so much an emotion as something tangible in the hand, there is a whole life lived. The lights from the eastern window come in strange patterns, time slowed with the progression of a rather uncaring sun; the glass itself, where it isn’t broken, is sloped and uneven, cheap glass that is clear but wobbly. Through it, Grantaire finds his quick glance pulled into something else, a tunnel of life that allows him to walk through those slowed moments, minutes, seconds as they stretch, like heated glass, into long sticky tendrils you mustn’t touch. 

Boots on wood make a very distinctive sound, the hollowness of the room below drawn up through the heels into the soundboard of the floor. The world can be worked into a series of instruments, drums and guitars and flutes made of slapped hands on thighs or laughter or wind through branches or the moistened middle finger drawn around the rim of a glass of wine. Songs tumble out of life everywhere, without being asked for by anyone. Trying to hush them does little good, because the world was created for songs, or by songs, or with songs. Something like that. Humans make songs when they speak, whether or not they fit music to the words, and Grantaire hears the drawn in breath of the man beside him as a sort of song. He knows, with a strange thrill of pride, that he is the only one who will hear it. He is an audience of one, the perfect audience who understands and resonates with it, trembles himself as though he was a branch, a reed, a guitar string, a piece of torn paper. 

In this other life, this life lived in a few seconds while they stretch away from the waves of heat and cold that flood and abandon his face, he feels the man beside him stretch and breathe in the early morning. Their world is not Paris, is likely not even France, is potentially not even Earth, as far as Grantaire can tell, because he’s never seen a place like this, with the hill of Enjolras’ bare shoulder so close to him. No one sleeps so well on the Earth, he knows, even infants in their mothers’ arms whimper after a bit for something to drink. He would like something to drink, back in the other minute, but here that doesn’t touch him. What could be as perfect as this morning in that other life? Had he known about the fine golden hairs on the arms of the man he is standing beside in a final moment in that other life? No, but he must have imagined them and known them as one knows one has lungs and such. There is tossed hair on their shared pillow that is the color of things one expects to describe with sunlight and gold and summer wheat. None of those words really do it justice, but Grantaire is fairly certain, seeing it now, that the curls will fit perfectly around his finger as though a Creator intended them as a sort of lock and key. 

In that other life, his heart pounds and his head is light. He is a body and soul about to be both but separated. His hand by his side is full of fear as if it was a warm fluttering thing, like a bird, like holding a dove or a pigeon, and Grantaire supposes his other hand, the one that feels exceptionally cold, is the one that is holding regret. Does he feel any regret? Somewhere else, he isn’t even standing at all. June is fresh and new, ready to be consumed as the sweet cream from the top of a pail of milk. There are curtains fluttering in the window of a house that will never be his while he lies on a bed he has never actually slept in. 

Could he dare it now? Now in this time drawn away from time, where there are no sounds of breaking or harsh yells, where he has never known what it is to count down a lifetime. Here, the clock doesn’t even tick, the wait between seconds is so long. Grantaire could wait, could bide time that he has stolen, or that the universe has stolen for him. Only he knows that it isn’t his, that it could collapse at any time, a soap bubble of imagination that is as fragile as he knows he is. Why, if there is a God, did He make human beings so soft and breakable? Why did He make them so easy to puncture, so susceptible to the cold, so weak to the shape of another man’s lips? Everything was fragile, and perhaps that was what made it so beautiful. If you knew something would always be there, you could walk it by a hundred, a thousand times and only let your eyes slide by it. If you knew it wouldn’t last, a flower that would be brown and blown in a day, then perhaps you would stop to smell its momentary perfume, to let yourself take a velvet petal between thumb and forefinger, gently, oh so gently, as though you would hurt yourself as well as the flower were you too rough with it. 

The golden hair moves, stirred by his breath as he moves closer. Behind him, not this him, but the other him who waits and shivers once as the muscles around his ribcage draw in closer, protectively, knows that time will crash in at any moment, that crueler men than he are also less patient men than he. If he doesn’t do it now, this world will disappear forever, potential never realized. This world will collapse when he does, he knows this, but before it does, he wishes to make it perfect. There is so little perfection in life, in his life in particular. What could it hurt to give himself a moment of it now?

There are sounds in the other life, the horrible mechanics of rifles and fingers, of orders and readiness. There are smells in the other life, sewage and spilled wine, spilled guts and vomit and rotted wood. It has always been horrible, that other life, with only Enjolras’ sun to brighten it all, so he had huddled as close as he could to try to see it all under that light. His heart seems to skip as his mind rushes back to that slowed time, to that place that is warm but not too hot, where he sees everything he wants just before his eyes. 

There are freckles on the back of Enjolras’ shoulder. He knows he cannot know them (when has he ever seen him shirtless?), but the humanity of them makes Grantaire weep a little; the pillowcase is damp. They form a shape, the distinctive tracing of stars in the sky, the constellation Libra, weighing justice. He dares not touch them with his hands-- one holds fear and the other, regret. His fingers aren’t worthy to touch this most human part of Enjolras, this little crack in his porcelain perfection that Grantaire loves even more than the rest. 

He leans forward and pressed his mouth to that shoulder, parts his lips and lets his tongue just taste the warm skin and slight rise of one of the birthmarks. Grantaire’s hands empty; the fear has gone and there are no regrets left. Time catches up and the bed and dancing curtains and bare shoulder fall away and he is left facing a drumming heart and the soundboard floor and the empty dark tunnels of rifle barrels. The breath is still leaving Enjolras’ lips as he reaches for his hand. No longer empty, a lifetime lived in the clasping. The sky will never be as blue again, Grantaire realizes and it makes him smile a little in the one moment that is left.


End file.
